A few words on mindfulness
Mindfulness is a term to describe the practice of gaining insight into the self, and of creating a sense of awareness in the present. The benefits are improved health, well-being and gain of time. Mortality and suffering are hard to grasp; our concept of time is hard to grasp. On the one hand it is considered very hard to exist in the present moment; on the other hand it feels like all we do is live from moment to moment, completing the next task, responding to a want, need, request, demand or threat. Mindfulness is a means to create space for the self. Advocates and practitioners refer to meditation as a tool to access a mindful state - having an awareness of how one is feeling in the present moment, what is happening inside the body, and simply acknowledging it, rather than acting on it. Two cited techniques to try are breathing and naming.
Breathing: focus on the breath through meditation (“this is my in-breath, this is my out-breath” and onwards). This approach to meditation is described as very easy to learn, quick and accessible to all, with countless guides on YouTube (some links are given here), other sources on the web and phone apps. Advocates say that it helps calm the system, relax the body, and give the soul something to build from. The goal of such meditation is to be more (rather than less) engaged with one’s everyday life and to take more pleasure in it, alongside other rituals we might have for ourselves such as a much relished cup of coffee or a morning walk.
Naming is a term to describe the process (usually best practiced during meditation) of taking the time to ask oneself, “how are you/ how do you feel” and responding by naming the feeling. Perhaps the answer is “I feel angry” or “I feel nervous”. There are many words to describe feelings, but they can often be distilled to a few basic ones. Identifying a particular set of feelings (we often feel more than one thing at the same time!) helps for the self to recognize what is going on inside, before reacting, and therefore giving time to consider choices. Naming sounds like an odd or unusual undertaking, but it is simple, takes little time, and can offer preservation of the self in the face of a want, need, request, demand or threat.
The practice of mindfulness, is currently thought to be making an important contribution to the workplace and people’s professional development. Many Fortune 500 companies are incorporating elements of mindfulness into their work philosophy. The basic idea being the well-being of individuals has a dramatic effect on the creation of a thriving and productive workplace.
One motivation for practicing mindfulness is the more widespread acceptance of neuroplasticity, encouraging the mantra, What you practice, grows stronger. Neurons (nerve cells) in the brain are known to generate new connections to compensate for injury and disease and adjust connections according to changes in their environment. We used to think the brain once formed, cannot be altered. If this is not the case then perhaps we can “train” the brain in the direction we’d like to go, even towards improving our behavioral patterns or outlook. This is not a new idea - more of an ancient one in state of revival.
Our wonderfully complex brains which are themselves a summit of the evolutionary process, respond to the outside world at some basic emotional levels, using machinery that science is continually unraveling, with familiar terms such as amygdala, medulla, cortisone, limbic system, adrenaline. We are all of us, in our minds and bodies, very much aware of what stress feels like. Stress is a useful, necessary tool for survival and enables the body to sense danger. But in our modern, highly socially complex world, how easy is it to recognize a trigger, or perceived threat, versus an actual threat. There is a big difference between reading (or misreading) the tone of an unpleasant email versus encountering a bear in the woods – while the feelings are real in both cases, the options and subsequent choices are very different!
Mindfulness has a place in time, since every self has a past and a future. Discovering the past is often key to understanding what is going on in the present, and also helps open the path to a more fulfilled and self-determined future.